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Biography
AnaMary Bilbao (PT/ES) was born in Lisbon (1986, Portugal). Her work engages with universal questions by foregrounding the intrinsic potential of the image — at its points of emergence and dissolution — to interrogate the fragility of truth within prevailing regimes of control and belief. Bilbao's critical practice consistently enacts interruptions within narrative and structural regimes as a means of destabilising established forms and activating critical disruption. This approach becomes particularly pronounced in her time-based works, which are articulated through non-linear relational dynamics between image and sound. By mobilising both analog and digital technologies to fold, displace, and overturn perceptual experience, Bilbao’s works generate an unsettling register that invites contingent interpretation, opening pathways through which entrenched dogmas and codes are continually reconfigured.
Bilbao studied History of Art at the New University of Lisbon (2007, Portugal) and completed an MA in Contemporary Art at UCP — School of Arts (2016, Portugal). Awarded a doctoral scholarship by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), she completed her PhD in 2023 at the New University of Lisbon. Her doctoral thesis incorporated periods of research at the School of Arts – Birkbeck (Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, University of London, U.K.) and Johannesburg (South Africa) where she worked in proximity to William Kentridge’s studio, artist to whom she dedicates the final chapter.
Her extended period in New York — including her residency at the ISCP (2022) and subsequent studies in Film and Animation with Mono No Aware (2023) — marked a substantive shift in her practice, leading to a more focused engagement with the moving image.
Since then, the artist has consolidated a practice devoted to the articulation of new temporal and perceptual frameworks, deliberately distancing herself from explanatory narrative models and instead prioritising the ongoing recalibration of the structures that underpin her methodological approach. Bilbao’s work is consistently shaped through processes of internal reconfiguration.
Recent exhibitions of Bilbao’s work have been held at ZDB - Galeria Zé dos Bois, Lisbon (2025), Galeria Avenida da Índia / Galerias Municipais – EGEAC, Lisbon (2024), Photo Basel (2023), International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York (2022), Field Projects, New York (2022), Paris Photo / Curiosa (2021), MAAT – The Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology Lisbon (2019), Opening Arco Madrid (2019), Leal Rios Foundation, Lisbon (2019), among others. The artist’s work has been screened at national and international venues and museums, including Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (organised by Mono No Aware, 2023); Anthology Film Archives, New York (organised by Mono No Aware, 2023); Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Paris (2024); Batalha Centro de Cinema, Porto (organised by Contemporânea, 2024); MAAT — Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon (16th edition of FUSO, 2024).
AnaMary Bilbao has been the recipient and/or finalist to various distinguished Portuguese awards such as: Acquisition Prize from EDP Foundation / MAAT – The Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (16.ª ed. Fuso, 2024); Grant for Studying Visual Arts Abroad from Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (2023/2024); Grant from Luso-American Development Foundation Artist Residency in the U.S.A. (2022); Finalist for the 1st edition of FLAD Drawing Award (2021); Finalist for the 13th edition of EDP Foundation’s New Artists Prize (2019); Doctorate Fellowship from Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) (2015-19).